Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Many of us are familiar with the old quotation, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." But we rarely stop to think what other religions we have. Safety is one. Science is another. Tolerance is yet a third. And when fascism comes to America, it may well be wrapped in those as well.

Don't break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of the site.

So... uh... not to be master of the obvious, but which rule was broken? /r/fatpeoplehate was a community of people who disliked fatties. Not particular fatties, fatties in general. (It's not a prejudice that I share, but I understand the resentment and disgust, even if I'm about to have a double bacon cheeseburger just to spite them).

And even more... who wrote those completely juvenile rules? They read like a kindergartner proclaiming herself Führer in the name of safety. Reddit has gone downhill more quickly than anyone has anticipated. It's a simplistic view of the world where criticism is bad, but people click on ads is good.

We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas.

Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals. If a subreddit has been banned for harassment, you will see that in the ban notice. The only banned subreddit with more than 5,000 subscribers is r/fatpeoplehate.

According to Reddit dictator Ellen Pao, the following subreddits were removed:

However, zero evidence was given of who these subreddits 'harassed' and whether that was general criticism, e.g. "Taylor Swift writes boring songs" or specific criticism, e.g. "Dave Hamilton smells like stale cream cheese." These are important determinants as to whether Reddit is merely removing troublesome ideological enemies, or enforcing some actual policy.

2 Comments:

Chairman and number one leader, Pao, has signed the death warrant for reddit. Congrats, you'll become the new Dig. No, I am not a member of any of these, now banned subs but I found the dictators explanation on the why, to be weak sauce and in violation of reddit rules. You can't go changing the rules, to accompany belly aching persons.